


to discard and discover

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Infidelity, Mildly Dubious Consent, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Canon, Ritual Sex, Self-Discovery, Sex Magic, Something Made Them Do It, Writing on Skin, office politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:27:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25074583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: Cleaning up Voldemort's lab wasn't a project for a novice Unspeakable, and Hermione wasn't meant to succeed at it. But if she can just find the right assistant, she'll manage. Written for equalityauction 2020.
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson
Comments: 16
Kudos: 91





	to discard and discover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outlier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlier/gifts).



> Written for outlier for equalityauction 2020. I hope you enjoy this fic - the premise we agreed on sort of ran away with me, wordcount wise.
> 
> Title from "Hell" by Tegan and Sara.

Hermione had been qualified as a full Unspeakable for about a year when the head of the department called her into her office. She laughed it off to Parvati, but she quailed as she clicked up the hallway, went into the room of spinning doors, and called out the hallway number for the head offices. 

Director Antandre Nott Selwyn was known to have sympathized with Voldemort in the seventies, even if she hadn't been involved in the war. She hadn't interfered with Hermione's career, although that might have been because there were now minimum hiring quotas for muggleborns and halfbloods with recent muggle heritage. Hermione had qualified faster than anyone else in fifty years, in fact. So this was probably fine, unless it was the moment when Hermione found out that was a ruse and it _wasn't_ fine.

"You wanted to see me, Director Selwyn?" Hermione asked, pushing the door open.

Director Selwyn looked at her. She was over seventy now, but the usual custom in magical society of retiring from public service and allowing the younger generations their turn was not practiced in the Department of Mysteries. ("After all, if we retire they can't watch us to make sure we don't blow up reality," had said one of the younger Unspeakables during a pub run months back.) She wore robes that would have been antiquarian thirty years ago, and her hair was still a deep, dark brown. 

"Unspeakable Granger," Director Selwyn said, nodding to her. "Sit down."

Hermione sat. Using her title was a good sign. She hoped.

"Your work on the parallel timelines project has been excellent," Director Selwyn said, steepling her fingers together.

"Thank you, Director," Hermione said. "What's wrong?" She could hear the but coming a mile away.

Director Selwyn smiled thinly. "It's been defunded," she said. "The Minister has determined that the strategic benefits of analyzing Time-Turners are not sufficient to justify the risk, although unofficially the problem is more cost. I have another project here for you," she continued, picking up a file. "I'm afraid it's more clean up than development, but you'll be in charge, you'll have adequate funding, and you can request a few people to help, although they'll need a certain security clearance."

Hermione extended her hand for the file, but the director didn't hand it over. "What is it?" she asked.

The smile widened. "We've found Voldemort's personal lab," Director Selwyn said, and the jaws of the trap slammed shut.

She put in the requisition form for Auror support first thing the next morning and specified Harry Potter, Parselmouth on it. The Auror Department sent her an approval back by lunch; _they_ were headed by Williamson, who'd been a first responder in the Ministry in 1996 and apparently remembered peeling her off the Department floor, although Hermione had been unconscious. She and Harry went to scout the location in the afternoon, armed with the Auror Department's Curse-Breaking supplies and the Unspeakable field work kit.

They Apparated to the middle of a deserted field. "It's supposedly an abandoned farm on muggle maps," Hermione said, gripping the file in hand. "You see those foundations over there? -that's the lab, the stairway down to the root cellar's been reinforced and then at the bottom there's a door inside."

"How did they identify it?" Harry asked, wand in hand.

"Supposedly it was a tip that got forwarded to the Department from MLE, and then our field people confirmed there were traces of Voldemort's magic. No one has actually been inside." Of course, Hermione had her suspicions about whether the paper trail existed. And if Director Selwyn knew where Voldemort's personal lab was, that raised some terrifying questions about how 'uninvolved' she'd really been.

They found the stairway, and the door at the bottom. Then they spent forty minutes going over it in detail with every formal trick they hadn't known during the war before they pronounced it safe to try the knob, and when it didn't turn, for Harry to make the strangled hissing sound he said meant 'Open' at it.

The knob clicked. They glanced at each other. 

"I'll cover you, my reflexes are faster," Harry said and raised his wand; so Hermione reached out and grasped it, and pushed it open.

The doorway was dark. Then light flickered on. For a moment of confusion Hermione thought that there was _electricity_ in the lab, but when her eyes adjusted she saw that it was coming from hovering spheres spaced throughout the room: automatic lighting, but not muggle style. The room wasn't as modern as a muggle lab but well in line with what Hermione expected from the Department: broad wooden counters and two long oak tables, cabinets, instruments metal and magical stored and silent. Three doors led off of it, all closed.

“Hang on, there’s a protection spell just inside,” Harry said. Hermione snapped back into focus.

They identified it as a personal identification spell keyed to Voldemort’s soul; it would have let him in, or any Death Eater with the Mark and its tie to his essence. Passengers - victims - could be brought in at the same time.

The two of them spent twenty minutes failing to find any weaknesses before Harry said, “--Honestly, this doesn’t require _active_ traces, the Horcrux that used to be in my head should work--” and stuck his hand through before Hermione could stop him.

The spell shivered in response; then it dissipated harmlessly. They stepped through, and nothing happened.

They went over the rest of the room for more spellwork of course, but they only found the usual sort of thing: containment magic, spells to protect against setting the lab on fire. The cataloging was going to take ages, but _that_ was a legitimate project and Hermione actually felt a certain amount of anticipation for it, beneath the simmering anxiety over how horrible the experiments Voldemort had been conducting would turn out to be. 

It seemed that the protections on the door really had been all; this was a lab, after all, not a trap. Voldemort had needed to come here regularly, and – judging by the handwriting on the notes – he hadn’t been the only user. It had to be accessible.

They went over the doors leading off the lab one by one. The first led to a set of stairs down another level, which turned out to be the library: one immense room of books upon books. Even knowing half would inevitably be cursed Hermione was practically drooling to get a look at it. The second was a sort of crash pad, a tiny kitchenette with a cot and a tinier toilet off it. They had something similar in the Department, for experiments that had to be watched day and night.

She had nearly lost her sense of anticipatory dread by the time they opened the third room, so of course that turned out to be where they’d been keeping test subjects.

The bodies had been removed. That was about the one thing that stopped Hermione from screaming. She didn’t doubt she’d find pieces in the main lab, and there were some horrible looking stains on the floor, but whoever had tipped off the Aurors – or Director Selwyn herself – had come through and pulled out the actual corpses. What was left looked something like a dog kennel, five partitioned cells, bare runs with barred swinging doors instead of chain link fence. Each one had a mat on the floor and a sheet – no pillow – and a bucket with a Vanishing charm on it.

They had to go over that room for traps, too. They found the strongest spellwork on the cells, unsurprisingly, sound proofing and impermeability and one that would have caused intense pain if any of the inmates dared touch the doors from the inside, but nothing directed at a potential intruder. Either those, too, had been removed; or Voldemort had been supremely confident the lab wouldn’t be found.

They left the lab and went up to the field when they had gone over everything, and used cleaning charms on their hands several times each. It had taken a few hours and Hermione felt drained. Her head pounded. Seeing that it was still light out was surreal. She looked at the wildflowers grown over and in what seemed to be only an abandoned foundation in a field, and thought that it could have been pretty if she didn’t know what was under the old house.

Well, if the Director was a Death Eater messing with her a little hazing was probably the best she could have asked for. Hermione was _not_ going to give up the assignment. She’d finish it and she wouldn’t admit to having a single nightmare.

Once she got started it was fairly routine. Anything related to a solvable crime or human remains would be passed on to MLE, to pin on a specific accounted for Death Eater or investigate, and to contact the family. At least that part wasn’t Hermione’s job. Since the lab belonged to a known, dead war criminal, all of the property was forfeit, and anything MLE didn’t want was now the Department’s. Most of the work consisted of sorting it, containing it safely, cataloging it and sending it to the appropriate place.

Hermione needed Harry to get her in and out of the lab, and they worked well together, so she had one assistant. The rest of it was a little more of a problem, because she didn’t want to traumatize the other muggleborns newly qualified in the Department _or_ ask another Voldemort sympathizer to work with her. In the end she requested a couple of seasoned Unspeakables: Cornfoot, who was old enough to be Hermione’s mother and well known to be imperturbable, and Madley, whose position was a constant subject of speculation due to his utter lack of creativity but who could file papers like a computer and probably didn’t have enough imagination to be disturbed. 

Together they bagged and tagged the library and the artifacts in a week, and filed the notes into loosely organized binders in another three days. It wasn’t even close to analyzed, but since Hermione was only assigned clean up it didn’t need to be. It would undoubtedly become another document collection people constantly bemoaned the untapped potential of. That wasn’t her problem.

Unfortunately getting the site back into usable condition – preferably for its ostensible purpose of farming – _was_ Hermione’s problem. Voldemort had been working Dark magic in the lab literally for decades; the earliest experimental records were from the fifties, before anyone had even known he’d returned to Britain. It had been shielded, so an adult human walking around in the lab, or twenty feet up above ground, was fine.

“But growing food _won’t_ be,” Hermione said, gesturing with her pint glass in irritation. “He didn’t put the lab underground by mistake, earth tends to contain magical effects – it’s probably why Slytherin put the Chamber of Secrets in the dungeons – but that’s by letting it seep into the soil, and using that soil for other stuff...”

“So you’re saying, if you clear the site and the Ministry auctions it off, some farmer is going to wake up one day and find his broccoli plotting world domination,” Harry said.

“Or he’ll grow hay and sell it, and the farmer who feeds it to _her_ cows will get gored to death because they’ve developed fangs and a taste for human flesh,” Hermione said gloomily. “I’ve been looking up solutions. This used to be common before there were more regulations on magical experimentation--”

“There you go,” Harry said encouragingly.

“—But they’re all five hundred years old and developed according to the mores of the time, and Director Selwyn’s starting to make noises like she wants me to finish up, I don’t have time to develop something from scratch and just throw it on top of Voldemort’s magic and _hope._ ”

Harry tried to press her on what ‘mores of the time’ meant, but Hermione kept her mouth firmly shut. Honestly, if it had just been sacrifice – _not_ human, but a cow or something – she’d have gone for it. Hermione ate meat. But she wasn’t just trying to raise power for a ritual. Voldemort had been messing around with death magic, and in order to purify the earth over his laboratory from it, she’d need to counter it directly.

Which primarily meant sex magic.

Okay, she theoretically could have obtained the assistance of a pregnant unicorn, but the chances she would locate and convince one in the next couple of weeks was microscopic, particularly as Hermione was _not_ a virgin.

She had a copy of the ritual specs written out. She’d been thinking about it when Harry sent a memo asking her to meet up with the junior Aurors at the pub. It wasn’t technically difficult, and – best of all – she wouldn’t have to apply to the Director for special permission, since it was within the parameters of the normal experimental and ritual magic Unspeakables used. Some of the ingredients were a bit expensive or iffy, but again, nothing worse than what she’d been regularly working with back on parallel timelines.

The real trouble was that she needed a partner.

Her first thought had been to ask Ron, of course. She could have; the Department had an actual procedure for getting temporary security clearances for sex magic. People who were married to muggles had a hard time, of course, and in the past people with muggleborn spouses too, but Hermione’s boyfriend was a respectable pureblood shopkeeper (provided you didn't know it was Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes he part-owned). Under previous directors the fact that they weren’t married could have been an issue, but premarital sex wasn’t one of Director Selwyn’s hangups.

No, the real trouble was that Hermione was nearly certain Ron wouldn’t agree, and honestly, she wasn’t sure how it would affect their relationship if she asked. The inability to talk about her work had sometimes been a blessing. Harry and Ron had done Dark magic during the war, of course, but now it was over... Ron’s own father worked in MLE. He’d been raised with certain ideas about what magic was right – and Harry’s convictions might overrule them, but Hermione’s? Not likely.

She’d thought of asking Harry, too, but she couldn’t do that to him or Ron. If she was going to have sex with someone beside her boyfriend – she shied away from the word cheat; Ron knew the rumors about Unspeakables, and this wasn’t a pleasure thing – it had better be someone totally uninvolved. Preferably someone who already had a security clearance, so she wouldn’t have to justify the choice to the Director, and so she could defend it if Ron ever found out.

Which left Hermione going over the personnel records, _again_.

She thought about asking Parvati, who she at least knew; but Parvati sometimes went with them to the pub, and to DA reunions, and people’s birthdays, and that was better than Harry but still had potential for trouble. She immediately ruled out the senior trainees and newest graduates; they weren’t _that_ much younger than her, two or three years at most, but the kids who had been too young to fight in the war felt like – well – kids to her, and most of them hero worshiped her. She’d feel like she was taking advantage. 

Of course, avoiding everybody who might know Ron and everybody younger left her flipping through _senior_ personnel, mostly upwards of a decade older than her, trying to figure out who was a blood purist, and wondering what she’d do if she caught a tell tale glimpse of the glamour ex-Death Eaters who hadn’t been caught used to cover the faint red mark that had once been the Dark Mark.

Someone knocked on her office door. “Unspeakable – _Granger_?”

She knew that voice; her stomach fluttered with dread. Hermione shut the file on her desk and turned to look into the unmistakable eyes of Pansy Parkinson.

She’d grown up. (Well, of course she had. They weren’t teenagers anymore.) Maturity couldn’t make her pretty – the pug-like look was built into the bones of her face and wasn’t going away – but she still looked... better. More confident. She was wearing grown up dark work robes, not the unflattering frilly accessories she had in school, and she stood square on her feet, not flouncing or ducking sideways. Her thick dark hair had been gathered in a knot at the back of her head. 

“Oh, god,” Hermione said. “You’re working _here_?”

“I’m a supplier,” Parkinson said. “Imports, you know. They said the Unspeakable in this office needed the delivery of Chimaera blood...?”

That was the last ingredient on the ritual list, aside from a person to perform it with. “Yes, I do,” Hermione said, recovering. “You’ll have papers?”

“Sign here and here,” Parkinson said.

She tried to focus, but Parkinson kept shifting awkwardly. It wasn’t hostile. Hermione was fairly sure she recognized her look because it happened periodically when they ran into certain classmates. The most _spectacular_ time had been when they ran into Draco Malfoy absolutely smashed in a bar off Diagon Alley and he’d _insisted,_ in the oblivious way of someone just a little more pissed than they should’ve gotten, on apologizing to Harry on his knees.

Hermione got through three pages before she said, “Go on, then, if you’ve got to say it.”

“Is it that obvious?” Parkinson said, but went on without making her answer, “Look, I was a complete bitch in school. I think I’m supposed to tell you about my traumatic upbringing but honestly, it wasn’t that bad, I just didn’t have a clue how to talk to anyone outside it. Also I was mean because I thought it was funny. It wasn’t. Sorry.”

“It was occasionally funny, if you happen to be a sadist,” Hermione said, and gave back the paperwork. “But I take your meaning. We were kids, Parkinson, it’s alright.”

“Thanks – here’s your vial,” Parkinson said. “And – it’s Pansy?” she finished hopefully. “If you like. I’ll probably be around, we just got a contract with the Department signed.”

Hermione had no choice but to say, “Call me Hermione,” or look like the stuck up one, but just as Pansy turned to go she had a thought.

“You’ve signed a contract, so you’ve got at least basic clearance, right?” she said.

“Er, yeah,” Pansy said, “But I was specifically warned against letting Unspeakables cut things off or offer a drink after that question. Nothing personal.”

Hermione looked down at the closed folder on her desk. “How do you feel about sex magic?”

It turned out that Pansy felt okay about sex magic, at least once Hermione clarified that they were doing a completely non-experimental and well-established purification rite and it was only the reasons that were classified. It turned out Pansy had heard of the rite, _and_ had had the mandatory pureblood Latin lessons as a child. (“From Aunt Christy, mind, not an actual tutor, my parents are only pretending to keep pace with people like the Malfoys. But they wanted a hope of us marrying up.”)

Not being totally irresponsible, Hermione checked Pansy’s contractor paperwork. Then, because Pansy was apparently happy to have an excuse not to go straight back to work and number-crunching, and Hermione wanted nothing more than to drop the whole file on Director Selwyn’s desk and pronounce “Done!” they gathered up the rest of the ingredients from the supply room and left.

“Nice place,” Pansy said, turning slowly in a circle inside the foundations above the lab. “Pastoral, except for the death magic. I can see why you need the rite”

“You can tell?” Hermione said.

Pansy shrugged. “I’m not _good_ at Dark Arts, not like Daphne or Draco grew up with, but yeah, my family taught me a couple of things. You don’t leave the kids totally ignorant in a family like ours, if only so they don’t sneak into the attic and drink out of a cursed goblet or something. I can’t tell you anything but that there’s death magic, but the opposite of death-bringing is life-bringing, right?”

“Right. Exactly. The equations--” Hermione cut herself off. Nobody cared about the equations. “We need to lay out candles at the cardinal directions,” she said instead, passing two to Pansy. 

They worked in silence for a couple of minutes. The rite was complicated, but not really difficult; they had to amplify the power they’d be releasing and spread it through the ground, as well as selectively channeling the _right_ aspects of that power: fertility and not coercion.

“Granger,” Pansy said, making Hermione jump and nearly ruin an angle, “Don’t take this wrong, but... I did think you had a boyfriend?”

“Ron’s not cleared,” Hermione said, and swallowed. If Pansy hung around the Department long she’d _know_ that was a misdirection. “He wouldn’t approve of, of – I didn’t want to ask him and upset him.”

“Right,” Pansy said. Hermione thought that was the end of it until she said, “So... Why _are_ you doing this, again? Aren’t there single Unspeakables?”

“Director Selwyn asked me to handle it,” Hermione said, winced at the note of shrill defensiveness, and said, “I’m not sure she’d take me refusing or asking for a substitute well. Especially given – the purpose.” She’d almost forgotten Pansy wasn’t cleared for that.

“Right,” Pansy said. “Yeah, knowing of Antandre Selwyn, I can see it.”

“Don’t tell me anything you don’t want repeated in court,” Hermione said gloomily. “—That’s the last diagram.”

“Right. Think happy thoughts, Granger,” Pansy said, and before Hermione could say _You’ve read Peter Pan?_ she was stripping off her robes.

The first thing they had to do, once they’d undressed and met in the middle, was paint runes on each other. Hermione had seen other girls naked – she’d lived in a dormitory for seven years, for the love of God – but staring would have been rude, and she’d spent enough time comparing herself to Parvati and Lavender at that age. Now she _had_ to look at Pansy to get the writing right. There was a line that went around each breast, and she had to pin them carefully to stop them wiggling, and Pansy kept disturbing matters by laughing until Hermione totally forgot to be self conscious and threatened to sit on her. 

“Kinky, Granger,” Pansy said.

“Quiet,” Hermione said, brandishing the paintbrush. Of course ink splattered across Pansy’s face. She promptly licked it. “That’s _ink_ ,” she said, laughing herself.

“So? It’s not like, top secret toxic Unspeakable ink, is it? I’m not going to fall over and die, or break out in feathers?”

“As far as I know it’s just normal ink,” Hermione said, rolling her eyes, but she felt a little looser, and it was easier to write neatly. She went around the other breast, and tipped a finger in the Chimaera blood to dab it on Pansy's forehead between another two runes, and then – feeling as though she was eating her out already – wrote on her lower stomach and down each inner thigh. Pansy stopped teasing her for that part; she leaned back on her elbows and went very still, except when she was trying to suppress shivers.

Then it was Hermione’s turn. The mood had gone from giggling to taut; she closed her eyes, then opened one, watching Pansy’s intent face as she referenced the diagram, tongue between her teeth, painting on Hermione’s breasts. Hermione was smaller-chested than Pansy, and while Pansy had seemed mostly oblivious to the sensation, she thought she was being driven mad by each stroke of the brush. They felt magnified, like someone scratching around at the base of her skull, or the pit of her stomach. 

She closed her eyes when Pansy went up to do her face. They were very close together, as though they were about to kiss. She could feel Pansy’s breath on her cheek. It was over in a second, and then Hermione had to lie down and open her legs. 

It should have felt like a violation; she had just been thinking about nullifying the coercive elements of the situation, hadn’t she? But the only thing she was dreading was having to wait while the runes dried on her inner thighs. Sex with Ron was – good, tender and hot, but it wasn’t like _this_ , this breathless, quivering anticipation. She felt like she was going to leap out of her skin every time Pansy’s hand brushed against her thigh.

“Alright, so that’s – five minutes until they dry?” Pansy said.

Hermione snapped back to earth. “Five minutes,” she agreed, flicking her wand at the hour glass by their supplies to turn it. “What do we do now? Party games? Small talk?”

“That’s why you bring alcohol to orgies,” Pansy said, and laughed. 

Hermione lay on her back in the grass, trying not to think about what was under them, and said, “I’m surprised to hear you’re working? I know you said your family doesn’t really have money, but in school I always thought...”

Pansy shrugged. “No, my parents were hoping I’d marry Draco,” she said. “Obviously after the war, that was out, only they didn’t agree, and neither did his. They thought, oh, all that fuss is over, the Dark Lord did turn out to be a bit of a lunatic so it’s probably just as well, back to the plan, now!” She snapped her fingers.

“And you didn’t,” Hermione said.

“And I didn’t, and Draco didn’t,” Pansy said. “I thought about the Great Hall – you know, when I said we should sell out Potter to the Dark Lord – about a million times that summer, but when I brought it up at the dinner table it was just, ‘Well, it was really the most reasonable proposition, Pansy!’” She rolled her eyes. “After a couple of months I’d had enough. I ran away.”

“You ran away?” Hermione said, rolling onto her side to stare.

“Careful, you’ll smudge the marks,” Pansy said, but she was smiling. “Yeah, I’d had enough, and I had my O.W.L.s and it wasn’t like anyone in our year had N.E.W.T. qualifications and there were all these people missing anyway, so it wasn’t hard to find a job. I had decent marks and they’d taught me accounting at home – you know, household management – so I got a job and I just... left.” 

She paused. “Didn’t have a _clue_ what I was doing, I’d never seen a lease or made my own dinner in my life, but I worked things out. I have a job, and a flat, and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission for spending money,” she said, and now Hermione recognized what she'd seen in her face: it was pride, and not the unearned kind.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s – really good. Come on, the time’s up, we can start,” she said.

Pansy leaned over. She’d taken her hair down when she undressed, and it spilled around Hermione’s face as they kissed, and Pansy’s hand insinuated herself down Hermione’s stomach over the dried ink of the runes.

The sex ritual required them both to orgasm and it preferred penetrative acts, although gender didn’t make much difference. If Hermione had been willing to conceive for this there might have been a bit of extra power, but she emphatically wasn’t, and so anything they did was basically a simulation. They’d brought a strap on. 

The rest of the rite went by in little flashes: Hermione flat on her back, grass digging into her hair and her heels raking the dirt under them while Pansy bounced on top of her, thrusting inside her; sweat mixing with the smell of grass and flowers and beeswax burning; heat roiling inside her, spreading through her to her fingers and toes and cheeks until she was burning from the inside out. 

She came with her fingers in Pansy’s hair and couldn’t remember when she’d grabbed it. Pansy shifted the angle and rubbed herself against the base of the strap on, staying inside Hermione, so she kept going with pleasant little aftershocks that made her toes twitch until Pansy finished and dropped on top of her.

“Well,” Hermione said, and cleared her throat lightly. “Well. That – should be adequate. I’ll run some tests, just as soon as I can move.”

“That was fantastic,” Pansy said. “I’m going to move now or I might fall asleep here. In a second. Damn it,” she said, and rolled off Hermione all at once, sitting up in the grass. “What was the death magic, anyway?”

“You’re really happier not knowing,” Hermione said, and went to run the tests.

They came up clear, so the two of them were free to clean up and get dressed. Pansy went back to work, and Hermione went to use the Department shower and write up her report. She dropped it off with Director Selwyn before they left for the day and had the pleasure of watching her eyebrows furrow with what Hermione imagined was frustration before she had to say, “Good work, Unspeakable Granger.”

That was the end of it. That _should_ have been the end of it.

A better person would have been bothered by guilt, or by keeping secrets. But Hermione barely had to lie. Ron was used to her not talking about work. He spotted a blur of ink on her temple and rubbed it with one thumb and said, “What did this?” and she laughed and said, “Ink, sorry, it's classified,” and that was all.

She kept thinking about the sex. She kept _missing_ the sex.

It wasn’t like she’d come over with some passionate longing for _Pansy Parkinson,_ of all people, who had been mean to her in school and then dropped out of her life until she happened to be a convenient partner for a sex ritual. It was just that the sex had been so good, and sex with Ron... wasn’t. It was the way she had stared at Pansy in her office, noticing interesting things about her face and her hair and the collar of her robes, and while she knew intellectually that Ron was good looking as an adult that was about as far as it went. 

Furthermore it felt like a door had opened in her mind, or a switch had turned on, and she _kept_ noticing women: the sparkle of candlelight on Parvati’s plait in the office, or Ginny’s fantastic shoulders when she dropped by in muggle dress to see Harry, and other women, total strangers. She felt like she’d been cursed, or she was losing her mind. She actually went and checked herself for spells – turning someone gay wouldn’t be the weirdest strange effect an Unspeakable had been hit with – but when she didn’t find anything she had to admit she’d been thinking...

Well, she’d been thinking that she was gay now. And it _wasn’t_ magic.

She wished she knew someone she could ask about it, but while Hermione knew _of_ a handful of gay couples among their social circle, and Dean and Seamus had announced their engagement at the last DA reunion party, there was no one she was really close to. Certainly there was no one she trusted not to mention it to Ron. Dean and Seamus had been his dorm mates. 

She was driving herself up the wall one day during lunch, trying to figure out if she could stand to walk into a muggle gay bookstore and ask if sometimes you just woke up one day, an adult woman with a career and a boyfriend, and discovered you didn’t like men, when she realized she’d been stupid. Pansy had brought that strap on from home.

Hermione took a deep breath, and some of the parchment she always kept on hand for ideas out of her purse. She wrote:

_Dear Pansy,_

_I hope you’ve been well since we last spoke. I don’t want to intrude, but I’ve been thinking about it – a lot, really – and you did suggest you wanted to be on closer terms, and well, I’m not sure who else to ask._

_I notice that you seemed to be more experienced with women than me, especially since you brought the equipment. I wanted to ask, assuming you are normally interested in women, how old were you when you realized it? How did you know?_

_Would you be willing to meet for tea some time?_

_Hermione_


End file.
